Not just you, archive today has a beef with cloudflare. I wasn’t even using cloudflare intentionally but iirc Firefox has a dns privacy setting that I had to disable.
Since May 2018[35][36] Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service would not resolve archive.today's web addresses, making it inaccessible to users of the Cloudflare DNS service. Both organizations claimed the other was responsible for the issue. Cloudflare staff stated that the problem was on archive.today's DNS infrastructure, as its authoritative nameservers return invalid records when Cloudflare's network systems made requests to archive.today. archive.today countered that the issue was due to Cloudflare requests not being compliant with DNS standards, as Cloudflare does not send EDNS Client Subnet information in its DNS requests
I see it too (but I'm a subscriber and read the article online).
There isn't much to see- Google/Alphabet (Pichai) has decided to align itself with the current government and eliminating these programs is a clear signal.
Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they? Whites were already under-represented at Google (and at 18/23 tech companies) back in 2017 [1]. If they've rolled over for anyone, it was for the Asian lobby, who is over-represented at 23/23 of those tech companies, and now won't be facing DEI pressures to reduce their numbers.
DEI programs discriminate significantly against Asians, just like college admissions. If these programs didn’t exist, the proportion of Asian employees would be even higher than it is currently, simply based on merit.
I think the real metric should be childhood household income. That transcends race or gender and universally inhibits the child in almost every measurable way.
On the contrary, targeting childhood household income will see representation of the groups you're trying to help drop to nearly zero. Impoverished white children outscore wealthy black children by a significant margin on standardized tests, and there are a lot more poor white children than poor black children.
There used to be programs like that, and they mostly helped the children of Chinese and Vietnamese refugees from communism. Low childhood household income doesn't really have much effect - "low income" in a US context is quite rich in a world context.
"childhood household income. That transcends race or gender"
vs
"targeting childhood household income will see representation of the groups you're trying to help drop to nearly zero"
Did you misunderstand the point? It seems right that if you want to help poor people, you should target poor people, how could that be counterproductive?
I think GP's point is that if the goal is to help those disadvantaged by childhood poverty, assuming similar levels of poverty, it will help white children who are relatively less disadvantaged and not help relatively more disadvantaged black children.
But that should be the goal. Using skin color as a proxy for being disadvantaged works only inasmuch the proxy is precise enough. If it's not, it's just another bias.
If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.
But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.
I think there are two different but related angles at play:
1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.
2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.
We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.
This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.
Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.
I understand that anti-black racism is still a factor today.
I really fail to see how doubling in on the importance and reality of race and skin color in particular (as opposed to culture) everywhere is going to make that problem go away.
I don’t know. When Sweden reached 58% women in university, they stopped the gender equality programs. Why would you help men if everyone knows they are advantaged?
(Oh man, please answer, but we’re overdue for an overcorrection, and it might look as dangerous as 1934).
> It's telling that culture will instantly lump anyone successful into the "white" category.
They also do the inverse, insisting that obviously white Arabs and Persians can't be white because they don't live in successful countries. (On the other hand, Russians can be white despite not living in a successful country. Who knows. In this case, it looks like "white" actually means "Christian", except for Middle Eastern or Korean Christians.)
Kim Kardashian was supposed to be non-Caucasian, if you believe Twitter. Her name clearly identifies her as Armenian; you can't get much closer to the Caucasus than that. Although it is true that she's only half Armenian, with the remainder being Scottish and Dutch.
>Russians can be white despite not living in a successful country
Which is especially perverse when one considers how ethnically heterogeneous Russia is as a result of the USSR's policy of integrating ethnic Russians into minority areas and shipping some number of those minorities back to Russia (basically so they don't incite discontent in their native lands).
Where I'm from, racial statistics and profiling are forbidden since they're antithetic with republican universalism ; but even taking the US culture into account, this point of view seems extremely bigoted.
At Harvard (and I assume other places, but those other places were not subjected to the level of discovery that Harvard was in SFFA v Harvard), diversity meant less Asians. Representation of whites was about what you would expect given their test scores and grades.
In France it’s forbidden to filter by race. Guess how they filter by criteria? Well the population under 25 is incredibly diverse so they don’t care about filtering, they just donate to everyone under 25. Can’t believe we gave up our land like this, they’re not even nice or thankful.
Well, the top US engineering colleges which they're hiring from also has an under-representation of whites and this is due to the Asian disapora being higher from also international students' representation (thus, analyzing diversity metrics is less so relative to the US population and more so for the global population).
It's not. It's distraction culture war politics - turning a class issue into a race issue. The real cause isn't a corporate love of racial diversity, it's a cross company initiative to decrease wages and disempower workers by heavily using H1Bs that just happen to come from India.
Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?
> from different years
You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?
> without enough detail to actually assess the impact of any DEI program
The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.
> isn't it wonderful that Meta has achieved greater black representation through content moderators in Kenya
Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.
> Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?
Why should I trust data I can't verify?
> You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?
Junk in, junk out.
> The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.
So when you said "Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they", what did you mean?
> Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.
Have you tried? Does archive.org have those urls? Are there other reports on those companies' diversity? Have you checked their mandatory government EEO-1 diversity reports [1]? It rather seems that you're nitpicking, looking for an excuse to ignore what by all accounts looks like someone's honest work. Do you have, for these companies, reports suggesting wildly different demographics, that is making you so skeptical?
Who is actually making the claims here about these companies "achieving diversity"? Me? Do you want me to do your homework? It's quite easy to post specious data to support your specious claims on the internet. Quite easy to generate a desired reaction that way.
You're claiming the data is specious, but you have offered zero evidence to that end, only very shaky speculation. You say some of the links 404 - of the ones that do not, were their numbers significantly different from the table in the article?
Amazon in your table lists 21% black employees. Maybe a lot has changed since 2017, but it sure seems like that might be misrepresenting the picture when 79% of those black employees are listed as laborers in the EEO-1 from 2023. But who can say!
Akin to this, the 2023 EEO-1 says 47% of professional employees are Asian! Wow sure seems overrepresented. Do we know anything about the compensation packages of these employees? No. We don't. We have no ability to tell if these are offshored employees, H1-B, under-compensated, what their tenure is, or even what the actual role of these employees are besides an incredibly broad categorization for them.
Also hmm, interesting that number gets cut by more than half when looking at the percentage of first/mid-level managers. Again have no idea if there's pay equity or equal opportunity at different levels of management.
What can we actually say about diversity at Amazon? Well "mission accomplished" obviously.
The table you link shows that execs/senior level managers are 63% White (over-represented 1.09x compared to US population) and 24% Asian (over-represented 4.08x). Mid-level officials and managers are 50% White (under-represented 0.87x) and 19% Asian (over-represented 3.29x).
My claims that the main beneficiaries are Asians, and that Whites are generally under-represented, are accurate.
Independent of whether these goals are appropriate or not, these actions (and those of so many other companies) are just so predictably craven.
These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet. Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
At least Costco seems to have a logical reason for what they do and stood by it.
It surprises me that these programs were ever legal.
It is strictly illegal in Australia to consider factors like gender or race when hiring. Even capturing these details from applicants is problematic in most cases.
The compensation payable if caught can be enormous, in the order of a years salary per applicant. It’s not even necessary to prove that a specific applicant was discriminated against, simply having a process which is likely to discriminate is sufficient.
The truth is it comes down to the exact details of the policy whether it's legal. There's tonnes of things you can do to increase diversity in legal ways. For example, Google recruits at college campuses, they must have selection criteria for which campuses they visit, no matter what that policy is it's de facto a diversity strategy.
As for whether it's fair. It seems pretty dependent on your view of the world. If your base case is that without any regulations you'll just get the best person for the job, then these programs all look like an aberration. But if your base case is that hiring isn't fair - people hire their family, their friends, people from their alma mater, people from their church etc. Then putting in a programme to mitigate the biases that do exist seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Other countries often have a clearer separation of responsibilities between government and business.
Governments are responsible for addressing social inequity, while companies simply hire whoever best meets their needs (within the constraints of antidiscrimination laws).
In America these responsibilities seem to have become blurred, resulting in an XY problem whereby people debate which hiring policies are best at addressing certain societal problems, without questioning whether it is even appropriate for companies to be taking on that responsibility in the first place.
It's not "strictly illegal" in Australia. Our anti-discrimination bodies across the country frequently grant exemptions to employers allowing sex-based or race-based discrimination in favour of certain groups (e.g. women, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people), in order to "improve access to specific jobs, programs or services".
I recall we have a specific carve out for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders, and I recall seeing specific hiring drives especially around the public service (I also am aware that elements of the federal government had a program specifically targeting autistic people too, which is also a protected characteristic)
Theres also 2 forms these DEI programs took.
1. (The FAA Thing) where they specifically manipulated their hiring system to ensure a greater percentage of african americans.
2. (What a lot of the tech companies did) Write tons of new HR documentation, and add checks and balances to ensure that the implicit bias of the hiring manager didn't result in a biased outcome.
Theres really nothing wrong with 2 in an Australian context other than the extra overhead. The overhead was carried for a while as it allowed companies to signal alignment with political stances. They are shelving these programs to signal differently.
Honestly I cant completely hate the idea of 2 either. I despise the idea of more HR people drawing paychecks, but I recall an incident 20 years ago where our team couldn't hire a woman because the all female HR team unilaterally decided she wasn't technical enough, and bounced her out of the running without telling the hiring manager. (The applicant was conventionally attractive and younger than the HR team)
It is, and always was, illegal to hire or not hire someone based on their race (or other protected class). You cannot legally just use quotas. At the same time, the EEOC will find a way to sue you if you are a large company with a lower proportion of minority employees than population. So companies had to get creative.
Trump EEOC will not do that. It's questionable if the EEOC even has the power to do that anymore after recent supreme court decisions that weaken regulators in general.
DEI programs favoring a specific race is the exception to the norm. DEI is supposed to be about stopping discrimination and bias. A common recommendation of DEI programs is to replace names with numbers so people looking at the resumes racial biases can't influence decisions.
> Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
No, because that would obviously be racist.
DEI would be favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job.
The just thing would be students from HBCUs having a level playing field along with everyone else.
It's no different than hiring managers selectively preferring graduates from Stanford or based on their surname's ethnicity, but it's hard to prove those things happen.
DEI is nominally about adjusting the situation so that the end result is equal. For example, paying women equally even if they don't negotiate as aggressively as men.
The nominal case doesn't always match the reality, but the reality is that no one has a level playing field to begin with.
The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.
In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.
But companies went in hard with things such as quotas, and there's even cases in the courts at the moment where Red Hat/IBM supposedly awarded bonuses based on hiring managers fulfilling diversity quotas.
Of course its controversial either way. Let's assume for our purposes that DEI is purely about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind (which we can absolutely argue about separately). It would absolutely be controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics and therefore has a large constituency of people it favoured. If I'm a rich white kid from a good family who went to a top school who gets into an Internship at Goldman because my Dad is golfing buddies with a Partner there then of course I would be opposed to DEI. And guess what? Rich white kids from good families and top schools have quite a lot of political capital.
And that's only those who directly materially lose out. Implicit in DEI is a suggestion that the American system is not a meritocracy, and if you accept that claim you are attacking the identity of a lot of powerful people who genuinely believe they got to where they are through unique skills and effort and not because they had any sort of advantage.
> controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics
Was it though?
Or was it just a result of society and culture outside the companies control.
The idea behind DEI is as if a car crashes into another car because of an issue with the road, that leads to one car being more damaged than the other, the solution is to make sure the less damaged car has the same amount of damage, rather than fixing the road.
That's a great example of a DEI-inspired policy that should be, at least in most cases, pretty non-controversial, and very beneficial to the company itself.
Have you tried deploying it? If you do, you'll find blind screening is extremely controversial. DEI types loathe it and will fight against it.
The reason is that de facto unofficial discrimination against white men is widespread and blind screening eliminates it, so the resulting hires are more male and western than before. Mostly this result is kept hidden within the organizations in question, but there are a bunch of reported cases where this happened publicly.
Even the famous orchestra study that kicked off the fad for these screenings supports this if you read the data tables carefully. The paper made it sound like blind screenings are better for women and racial minorities, but their data properly interpreted didn't say that.
You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job" is exactly what the concept hopes to prevent, not enable.
DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it, it is more about considering diversity and recognizing personal and institutional bias, and working to ensure that bias does not negatively affect people, whether that be in hiring, consideration for roles or promotions, and so on.
All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven, and if you actually look you can see it's already doing damage. There seem to be a lot of assumptions that women or people of color in high positions are "DEI hires" when they likely had to work harder than white men to get where they are. I mean firing a 4-star admiral because she's a woman and then claiming she was a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are. Automatically assuming a black or trans pilot is a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are.
I am a former hiring manager at Google and we were specifically told by hr that we could hire 2 people on one headcount if one of those people met specific dei criteria and there was a list of races and genders that met the criteria. One of my peer managers grew his org twice as fast as me by only hiring females with engineering degrees. He got promoted shortly after. Within 2 years his entire team was disbanded for being completely ineffective. Google ended up getting sued over this practice and they lost. This is not the only example I have. The worst of all was Eric Schmidt literally saying to us that diversity was "strategically important" as it helped to "increase the talent pool" and "keep salaries competitive." This was never about doing the right thing for employees.
I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.
It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.
IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses.
I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.
Finally, from the article in this post:
> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.
These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.
As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.
The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.
Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.
Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?
The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.
If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?
I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.
There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.
Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.
> You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.
Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.
Where can I look at these college test score requirements? I have never heard of such a thing besides minimum SAT score to be considered. Is that adjusted based solely on race at some university? Where?
Probably in the NBER report[1] on the data that came out of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case[2]. It's an interesting read, as is the other one on legacy applicants.
At the graduate level there are a number of resources which can illustrate the difference between admissions standards for people from “underrepresented minority” (URM) groups and non-URMs. They manifest as materially lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs for URMs. There are Supreme Court cases analyzing details, and prior to the most recent doctrine, the preferencing policies were totally open because SCOTUS blessed it in the case of law school admissions.
> All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven
Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.
As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.
> It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.
> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it
I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.
In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.
I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.
“Recognizing personal and institutional bias” sounds nice, until someone has to decide which biases or differences to overcome, and at what cost.
There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.
The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.
On the one hand, you have DEI policies like Harvard's college admissions or the air traffic controller hiring scandal. And of course DEI advocates always claim that these are obvious perversions of True DEI, which is only about expanding opportunities and never about discriminating against disfavored groups of people.
On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.
Has there been a big effort to call the FAA whistleblowers nazis?
I learned about it, went "oh that sucks", but never felt like they were being racist. They have a great evidentiary basis. Its not like some red hat guy screeching about losing his job without being able to show cause.
I'm all for DEI, however you too seem to misunderstand one critical aspect, the 'E' in DEI. The 'E' (Equity) aspect is very nuanced and if not understood and communicated well would lead to deadlocked discussions
Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.
This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.
I mean, considering West Point Academy is closing clubs like the National Society of Black Engineers or the Japanese Forum Club due to the anti-DEI order [1] I think that should tell you everything you need to know about what this change signals.
>the Japanese Forum Club, which described itself as a place for promoting “understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture and language”;
Don't know why West Point thinks that is required by the anti-DEI order, maybe someone is going through and looking at anything with race or gender in the name and shutting it down?
Imagine that someone decides recruiting needs a budget cut and shrinks the travel budget a bit. Managers shift to local career fairs instead. No one notices the complete lack of bay area HBCUs and a couple years down the road the pipeline is filled with people from Stanford with internships and internal recommendations competing against people from HBCUs that don't have either of them. One of these populations will look vastly more qualified on paper.
If that's what you consider to be useful evidence in a topic as complex as this one, heaven help whoever is paying you to make smart decisions for them.
You have been misinformed of how DEI works. Its goal is basically equal access to resources, addressing systemic inequities, and fostering an inclusive culture where everyone feels valued.
You cannot address systemic inequalities at the hiring level without some preferential treatment. The idea was that if you had two candidates who were equally strong, you pick the one from an underrepresented/disadvantaged background because they've had to work harder to get to the same place. At a surface level that is a disadvantage at the hiring level to the other one because the other gets a bonus tie-breaker.
The idea is that instead of just interviewing the people right next to you, who look exactly like you and have your exact background, you make the effort to interview a diverse set of candidates. Then you try to get rid of bias in the hiring process, and make the workplace somewhere that doesn’t make folks who are slightly different miserable. That’s it.
How does a company make an "effort" to interview a diverse set of candidates? There's an applicant queue not under their control, and a filtering phase at every step of the interview process.
What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination. This is based on ignorant beliefs that people who look the same, have the same gender, ethnicity or background, will inevitably think the same way.
These programs are judging people by superficial traits, while claiming they somehow make the hiring process fair. It's ludicrous.
> There's an applicant queue not under their control
Not 100%, sure, but that's far different from 0%.
Which job fairs do your company reps attend? Is there a built-in bias causing you to miss out on good candidates?
Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
> What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination.
No. The suggestion is that companies should not favor candidates because they have the same appearance or background than existing employees.
If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
The former discriminates on the basis of religion, and is prohibited in most cases.
Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
Are job fairs still a thing? IME most recruitment happens online these days, with the vast majority of candidates coming in via LinkedIn and other job boards.
> Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
Why is that a bad thing? Personal recommendations from someone you trust is a valid factor in making a hiring decision. This doesn't necessarily mean hiring someone who is inexperienced and not a good fit for the role over a better candidate just because they were recommended, but all else being equal, a recommendation is a strong signal to consider.
Although, truthfully, why is favoritism wrong? If a company prefers hiring someone based on a recommendation, they might have issues with their performance, but maybe that person makes the team happier and more productive. Ultimately, it's their decision to make and live with.
> If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
I think we can agree that candidates should be judged equally based primarily on their ability to fulfill the role requirements. My problem with DEI initiatives is that they emphasize superficial traits like religion, race, gender, ethnicity, etc., which are things we've fought hard to _not_ pay attention to in a professional setting. The effect of this is that it simply reverses the direction of the discrimination, but it doesn't get rid of it.
> Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
> Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
You can define what DEI is supposed to mean all you want, but the reality is that companies use it as an excuse for discrimination[1]. This is not surprising, as it's a slippery slope from "suppressing our biases" to "reversing our biases".
I said "primarily" above because there is inevitably a human component in deciding whether a person or team would want to work with someone, which can be interpreted as a bias. This is often referred to with vague terms such as "culture fit", or the rebranded "cultural contribution", "values fit", etc.[2]
The thing is that humans are innately tribal. We tend to favor like-minded individuals familiar to our own background and life experience. Even if you educate people to not be biased against/for a specific set of traits, we will still be biased against some others. Humans in general favor attractive, charismatic, confident and outgoing people. Should we fight to remove those biases as well?
In broader terms, what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs? That companies are 100% heterogeneous across all possible criteria that can identify a person? This is insane and unrealistic. It completely ignores not only our inherent biases, but the fact that some of our traits influence our career decisions and make us better suited for specific roles. For example, nurses are overwhelmingly female, while mechanics and electricians are overwhelmingly male[3]. Is this the result of discrimination in these industries, or simply a side-effect of what makes us different? Would these industries be any better if we forced them to discriminate against the majority of their work force?
The local college here in town just had a job fair so, yes.
My point was to give a couple of examples of how the applicant queue is not completely out of a company's control. Surely you can think of other ones.
> The thing is that humans are innately tribal.
The thing about humans is we get to decide what our tribe is, and tribe membership both changes and is multi-component.
We can decide to change our religion, which changes our "tribe", while also supporting the local football team (another "tribe") and be in the alumni club of a college (a third "tribe") while also celebrating Independence Day (a fourth "tribe") at a work (tribe #5) event.
Making your point rather meaningless, since we can change ourselves.
> what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs?
I don't care to have this discussion. I'm a programmer. I came to point out that your objection to DEI was invalid, at a level that even a programmer could point out.
Never called you a Nazi. Just said that the guy who gave the Nazi salute, twice, while standing behind the Seal of the President of the United States, is a Nazi.
Well, if they prefer a black candidate to a white one, the white one can complain of being discriminated against and accuse them of promoting DEI, which under the new administration can have all sorts of bad consequences for them. So they'd better play it safe and hire the white candidate...
DEI is not about picking lesser candidates to fill quotas, it's about ensuring the human recruiters don't get in the way of the best talent joining your company.
A big part of the unpopularity of DEI programs is the dishonesty.
We all know that these programs don't result in better candidates, and that standards are lowered, not raised, when they are introduced.
Just be honest about it and make the case for why you think lowering standards is a worthwhile sacrifice to accomodate people from diverse backgrounds.
Even better, make the case for why considering any of this is a companies responsiblity in the first place.
How deep in the talent pool does Google usually go? It seems to me many HBCUs end up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. I don’t think Google went out of its way to interview at my middling state school. Should HBCUs get a boost?
I'm not sure "craven" is the right word, but it's definitely something.
> These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet.
All of these DEI efforts were and are blatantly illegal. They were just never litigated for long enough that everyone was comfortable with doing them openly. The point of the executive orders isn't necessarily the orders themselves, but a clear signal the new administration will litigate these efforts that have always been illegal.
So many of these companies are backing away from the efforts and hoping that show of goodwill will ameliorate their potential upcoming legal risk. If they play ball, the new administration might accept the peace offering and not go full legal scorched earth.
Would be great to be more resources put in at the very start of the pipeline (e.g. early childhood education). It's very hard to "solve" "diversity" at the time of hiring when candidates have already had decades of disadvantage.
Good question. If the US is truly facing a "Sputnik moment" with regards to China nd AI, the US should bring back something like the "National Defense Education Act" (1958) which was aimed at bolstering American competitiveness in science and technology.
Well I suppose we should start hiring in science and technology then and not just stamp around saying how important it is to the future. All we have are layoffs right now. The signal the industry sends to would-be majors is to stay away.
The goal was to ensure that there was a more balanced result of education across the country. California can afford to spend way more per child than Kentucky can, so without some sort of federal level balancing, California's children are just going to be more likely to prosper than Kentucky's. This doubly applies to funds for disabled or underdeveloped children who needs extra support from the school system to be successful. Those programs are going to be largely cut across the red states.
Well, for what it’s worth, Kentucky has a stronger economy than Canada and we manage to find money to spend on education. The key part is to spend your money well, not spend more.
If spending is so important why are the most expensive districts the worst. Shouldn’t that money have helped them? And yet year after year, they remain the worst despite $20k+ per student.
Canada handles this balancing problem with equalization payments between provinces. Which is well, sorta socialist, so it causes a great deal of consternation amongst certain people.
From what I understand it's a lot more hands-off, it's a bucket of money that goes in (or out) of the budget that is used for education, healthcare, and other items. The province gets to decide how its used and the federal government doesn't get to withhold or dictate conditions. Unlike for example, highway funding and drinking age in the USA?
The question is how much administration does the education system really need? Many of the admin tasks are local in nature so I’m doubtful that moving it across the country will get good results.
Provinces handle it well enough but some better than others. The teaching curriculum did use to be less political but bringing federal politics would only make that worse. We have very diverse populations and needs from province to province. We generally rank well globally.
we try in mississippi but the conservatives slowly take away funding piece by piece because they don't want to educate black people, because then they wouldn't be able to control them.
Which spending and headcount for has increased since its inception, with no actual improvement in education (per Cato Institute). God forbid some accountability and no more wasting of tax dollars.
The fair way is to do so at all levels of the pipeline because it turns out people can overcome their past if given the support and resources to do so. But it’s far easier and cheaper to invest early on. All that said, real structural racism and sexism and other prejudices continues to exist, and so the pipeline will always be a problem.
But a company like Google, which makes obscene profits every quarter, should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice, because if whole categories of people are unprepared to work at Google because of societal failures, that’s huge numbers of potentially fantastic employees Google is missing out on.
> should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice
Google is a big company that can do a lot of things, but I wouldn't expect them to solve societal problems that plenty of other very profitable companies are making almost no effort in.
The models Google is developing may end up being the most impactful innovation in learning since the printing press.
I was recruited through Google's diversity program twice.
The first time, what that meant was that they invited their diversity candidates to a small pre-interview preparation session which, oddly enough, didn't bother to touch on what they were looking for in interviews. I took the interviews and was informed that I'd failed them.
The second time, I paid for coaching from interviewing.io, and I learned what they were looking for in interviews. This was not cheap. (There are some surprises! For example, they don't care whether you can answer their questions. If you can't, you're supposed to ask them how. This is not a normal testing style.) I took their interviews, and my recruiter informed me that I had passed, wished me congratulations, and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the current hiring cycle (which was about six weeks away). In the meantime, I'd have a set of "team fit" interviews.
Then, they never contacted me again, except to say that they'd realized that on second thought my interview scores were too low for them to hire me. Not a single thing was scheduled until the hiring cycle ended and they let me know that while my scores were good enough to have passed their interviews, they weren't good enough to be hired after passing the interviews.
There was no obvious "diversity" angle to that one, but when I complained to a family friend working at Google, they looked up the recruiter and were surprised to see that she was specialized in diversity hiring.
When I came over to the states to go to a tech conference at a NASDAQ listed billion dollar corp that bought us, the only black people I met were either working at the hotels (90% of that staff) or living in the nearby inner city.
I don't pretend to understand the USA, and maybe that conference wasn't representative, but to me it was quite shocking that the disparity was so clearly visible. So I think its a bit of a shame they're losing this, because from my perspective there was still a clear gap in terms of education outcomes which feed corporate and I would have liked to think these policies were helping to address that.
What you say is true, but these corporate diversity efforts are mostly used for PR and aren't actually making a difference to any race or community. The simple truth is that tech companies are going to hire any qualified engineer they can find, regardless of whether they are in a minority group or not and whether there is a DEI department at the company or not. So the question that should be asked is – why are black people (5-6% of CS graduates vs 15% of population), women (16-18% of CS graduates vs 50.5% of population), latinos (7% of CS graduates vs 20% of US population) etc. not pursuing STEM education and graduating with engineering degrees at the same rate as white and asian men? And what can we do to fix that? Diversity hiring at the corporate level is not the solution to the problem, education and training is.
You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.
I think it may be just a lack of role models. When I went to high school in 2005 (30% black, 30% Latino) all of them basically modeled themselves after who they saw on tv. Blacks gravitated towards sports. Hispanics towards construction and woodworking. The whites in my school mostly came from military, first responders so lot of them went military/firemen. I being one of the few Indians at the school gravitated toward tech because that was what I saw men in my community going to (even before the parental pressure).
I don’t think any of them were dumb, just focused on the things they saw members of their community do.
> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests
Are you seriously suggesting that black people are genetically less predispositioned to program? Explain the evolutionary advantage to that please because that sounds absolutely absurd.
Here's a strawman: White people are more likely to diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). If people with ASD are more likely to opt for CS degrees, by induction we'll have more white people in CS.
Except for the fact that people with ASD / Neurodiversity are often more likely to be passed over during interview and selection processes as they don't fit the social norms that hiring manager also expect.
So even if they are more likely to be diagnosed - and I presume you mean White 'Men' explicitly, as Women are even less likely to be - they're also more likely to not 'sell' themselves during applications in the expected corporate way, and therefore not get the high-paying jobs.
Diversity is not just Race or skin colour, but that's easier to see (and to consciously bias).
Accommodations for people with autism who might have different needs for things like noise levels or interviewing procedures would be a classic DEI effort.
from my rudimentary understanding of genetics; i don't think that's true or even could be true. These concepts like "white" or "black" are too large and mixed to be meaningful. Remember that the average African American has around 25% euro dna for example.
A lot of conservatives and American libertarians do say that some races are genetically inferior including in terms of intelligence and that they get what they deserve given their subhumanity
That's some real Nazi shit right there and I thought y'all were on the side of the free world or whatever. How does someone exist in 2025 with such ignorant views? I don't get it. MLK was like 60 years ago.
Ultimately the onus is on the people claiming a genetic component to find it and prove it. There are known social issues and have been for quite some time, after all there are people alive today who experienced segregation.
So if there's some genetic bias at play, as long as the social issues are right there staring us in the face, you're going to need to advance the science of genetics to get the answer. Without that it just comes off "race science" and that kind of thing.
Part of DEI at Google is to engage with universities to understand why some prefer not to study STEM/PR/whatnot. Shutting it down at Google will also affect the education pipeline.
Agreed on PR (or avoidance of negative publicity) being the main driver for Pichai to engage in the discussion, but there are many people at Google who care.
from my very basic reading on the subject I believe the cause is a lack of black students coming through top universities. I have seen it stated that there are many black developers but many of them do not have degrees and learn to program outside of university. I found this particularly interesting because this is my background as well, I come from a nation less hung up on degrees and willing to accept experience as a substitute.
Corporations could help by considering interviewing developers who go to other universities or those with good experience but without degrees.
I was expecting the US office to be more diverse than my UK office, given the large black population in the US, but that wasn't the case which surprised me.
You will be told that any systemic initiatives to address that are racist against whites who deserve more of a share of whatever is being done for others. Likewise any policies or initiatives along class line divisions are taking resources away from others who deserve a share of what may be given for disenfranchised/impoverished classes
DEI is fun and games until I am the person that won't be hired because I am not the niche to be de-discriminated. I remember coming to a Google stand on a conference, where they gave me form asking besides my email address, what is my ethnic background (strange word they used in my language, which I associated with gender etc, whatever would make me a minority) and would I mind share. I chose not to share and they even didn't drop me a line...
Ya maybe cause you refused to fill out a form that everyone else could fill out just fine. They probably thought you couldn't follow instructions and thought if they can't do this why would we proceed? You ever consider that?
Unless you know more about that incident than the op, it sounds like they didn't refuse to fill anything but instead chose to skip and optional section.
Commenters may be missing that Google, Amazon, etc., as US government contractors, are required to follow the legal requirements for all such contractors. Previously contractors were required to follow rules based on a policy set by a Johnson administration EO in the 1960's. That policy has been replaced by a new EO. Online commenters might prefer to focus on recent changes as representative of corporate culture, management ideology, etc. instead of business judgment (as in the "business judgment rule" followed by the US courts), e.g., meeting the necessary legal requirements to secure/retain government contracts.
There are advantages to diversity by itself. These have been well documented. So setting aside any concern about excluded groups, it was a good business decision to aim for a diverse workforce.
But taking those concerns up again, almost no one perceives their own biases as biases. It's like you don't perceive your own accent, people of different racial backgrounds look similar, you can't smell your own breath, etc. So being a biased person feels just like being an unbiased person, but it makes you make biased decisions. A person against whom you harbor a prejudice applies for a job. Your bias causes you to discount their better qualities and double count their worse qualities. So you hire someone else. This hurts both you and the person you didn't hire.
A policy that works against well-known biases, if implemented correctly, achieves three ends: it reduces the harm to the person biased against, it reduces the harm to the company whose hiring policies are distorted by bias, and it helps the company by producing a more diverse workforce, which is an end in itself regardless of whether you care about harms to others. If implemented correctly, diversity hiring targets can produce the effect of hiring without prejudice despite the prejudice of those hiring.
If you are crossing a river and the wind blows you off course, you don't head to your goal but to the side. The net result is that you reach your goal. The diversity targets are just tacking against the wind.
>There are advantages to diversity by itself. These have been well documented. So setting aside any concern about excluded groups, it was a good business decision to aim for a diverse workforce.
They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business. Of course, hiring racially diverse people while being antagonistic towards those with different ways of thinking does little to increase diversity of thought.
>But taking those concerns up again, almost no one perceives their own biases as biases.
Says the pot to the kettle. The way to prevent bias is to come up with objective factors to evaluate people based on, not intentionally injecting bias of your own.
>If you are crossing a river and the wind blows you off course, you don't head to your goal but to the side. The net result is that you reach your goal. The diversity targets are just tacking against the wind.
Alright, I'm going to take another swing at this. I will reorder things.
> Says the pot to the kettle.
That was my point. When I said "it's like an accent" I didn't mean I myself don't have an accent. It's that I don't perceive it. People do not perceive their own accents as accents. They don't perceive their own biases as biases.
But accents are still accents regardless of whether we perceive them. Biases are still biases.
My point wasn't that I am pure, free of sin. It wasn't about me at all. It was that biases are bad but often invisible.
> They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business.
Is it true? If so, who cares whether it was post hoc?
I don't know whether you've done any machine learning. Nowadays all the news is about LLMs, but back in the day there were other algorithms -- decisions trees, support vector machines, logistic regression models, simple Bayesian models, etc. You had a mess of data. You defined feature vectors. You vectorized your data and threw it at the algorithm. You got a classifier. Or a regression model or whatever. Then there were also meta algorithms that took these base algorithms and combined them to make something more robust and accurate -- a random forest or something. This meta algorithm worked only if these sub-deciders differed. You make one decision tree, duplicate it 1000 times, and wrap it in a random forest and you get nothing but wasted effort. To achieve the gain you needed your deciders to have different opinions.
This is the theory behind diversity in an organization: you have multiple viewpoints plus some mechanism to combine them into a final decision. It has nothing to do with race or gender or anything. It is a provable way to get better decisions.
Did someone also want to lift up people historically beaten down? Maybe? Thats also a good thing! It's awesome if you can get better decisions and also make a more just society, right?
> We have a word for this: racism.
What? This is just a shibboleth. Is racism a good thing or a bad thing? Is trying to counteract racism just as bad as raw racism? It produces a more fair outcome, but it's forbidden! We must preserve the injustice because to counteract it would also be unjust!
This is a ludicrous position. The point of using a DEI mechanism is that it is just that, a mechanism. You set it up and let it decide so that flawed human judgment doesn't decide. Is the mechanism racist? I don't know, does it have ideas and intentions?
Perhaps it will be clearer if I try to do some perspective taking for you.
Imagine there is a company with a South Asian CEO, CTO, etc. They only trust South Asians. Only South Asians are a good cultural fit. North Americans are lazy, unmotivated, dumb, incurious, entitled. They are poor team players. They won't put in extra hours, or if they do, it will achieve nothing. And then if you interact with them there's always this tension, awkwardness. You can't tell the same stupid American jokes. It's a joke! They have no sense of humor.
Now you are a North American with skills. You actually are very talented and insightful. You have lots of energy, lots of ideas. You would be a great employee. But this company will not hire you. (You disgust them a little.) Is this racism? I've just inverted identities, but I think you would agree that the company is racist and this is unfair. And it's clear that this racism harms both you and the company. But if the company's HR or whatever recognized the possibility that racism was tainting their hiring practices and implemented DEI targets as an impartial mechanism to work against this bias, that would be racist against South Asians! So to maintain their moral purity they should preserve their original racism and deny you the job. [slaps dust off hands and calls it a day]
Do you see the other perspective now? To summarize: racism is bad because it harms both parties. A mechanism that counteracts this helps both parties, and is just and good to boot. Saying that they are equivalent because they both consider race, to say that this makes them both equally racist, is to make "racism" a nullity, a thing of no consequence. If this is racism, it is good racism, because it rights an injustice. Or, alternatively, it is not racism. Racism is using race to commit an injustice, not to counteract it.
Probably primarily a business and cost-cutting measure (certain there's loads of DEI-related staff; NOT DEI hires, roles that exist to foster DEI policies).
I've a prediction somewhat related to this.
We'll see, in the coming year(s), a large portion of positions at the FAANG(s) being moved overseas as cost-cutting measures. Paired with the impression that LLMs reduce the need for programmers, we (domestically) will see a substantial reduction in the number of developer (and related roles) in the States.
From what I've heard/seen wrt roles at these companies there's a substantial imbalance in locations for hiring (huge increases in India, Mexico, Brazil, and others) and less and less in the States.
I worked on some DEI programs. The problem was mixed. Most companies (at least the ones with DEI programs) thought they had big DEI issues because minorities had worse outcomes. But if you looked hard, that wasn’t usually the case. It was merely that minorities were more represented at lower levels and lower levels had higher attrition and what not. On the whole, it tended to look like hiring, retention, and even promotions looked surprisingly equitable. That is, while it would take a long time, it did seem as if things would stop being crusty old white men at the top exclusively.
However there are some noteworthy qualifiers. First, the biggest thing these programs did successfully was just diversifying the entry points so that you could even begin to start conversations with people from other backgrounds. That’s huge and effective.
Second, and this one is more anecdata, but I never really felt the hiring pool of diverse candidates was randomly sampled at all. For all the groaning about meritocracy and white candidates getting shat on, I tended to find in my personal hiring that diverse candidates were often MUCH stronger candidates. I rarely saw unmotivated, underqualified minorities and women make it to an interview stage whereas there’s a ton of white and Asian guys that did. Getting these candidates was harder. Which is to say, without putting any intrinsic value on racial or cultural backgrounds, I do think DEI programs somehow greatly streamlined a meritocratic highlighting of talented folks from diverse backgrounds. Which is ironic because that’s often the opposite claim.
That is, given you are a minority applying to an advanced position, odds are you’re really strong.
> ...the biggest thing these programs did successfully was just diversifying the entry points so that you could even begin to start conversations with people from other backgrounds.
This. This was my experience with DEIA programs in the government. It was always about diverse recruitment, not hiring. People believe what they want to, though.
Most of these megacorporations have no beliefs or values except their own profits and growth. Everything else is political expediency. This is just based on a lifetime of observing their behavior.
Isn’t it obvious that any artificial forced attempt to “balance” a very complex system from within by a primitive set of rules is gonna sooner or later fail and eventually cause even more imbalance and chaos?
The only way is to “naturally” help create conditions that hopefully will slowly yield. Sure there aarea many vague lines there, but at least we should be rational enough to choose the right attitude, right general approach.
What could be more racist and stupid then these “hiring targets”?
All the talk about "diversity" in tech companies always reminds me of this Silicon Valley scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY. Still the perfect representation of the entire effort.
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This is pretty much the first half of the article (until the archive.is link starts working):
"Google is eliminating its goal of hiring more employees from historically underrepresented groups and reviewing some diversity, equity and inclusion programs, joining other tech giants rethinking their approach to DEI.
In an email to employees Wednesday, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.
In 2020, amid calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.
Parent company Alphabet’s GOOGL -7.69%decrease; red down pointing triangle annual report released Wednesday omitted a sentence stating the company was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” The sentence was in its reports from 2021 through 2024.
Google also said it was reviewing recent court decisions and executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and federal contractors. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” the email said...
“We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S.—and in many countries globally—but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said... "
It's not that these diversity policies were effective at addressing the underlying issue, they looked ridiculous to someone from the outside. What is hilarious and scary at the same time, is how these global corporations, the supposed progressive forces, are reversing them in quick succession one after another one 2 weeks into Trump's presidency.
> “ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
This certainly has been brewing under the surface for quite some time now, not just in business, but in most of society. What's changed is that now the dominoes have started to fall, people are finally comfortable expressing it in clear terms.
I remember reading his memo and agreed with many things he said. I think the public overreacted. He was right that DEI ignore the hard questions and discriminates another group.
I'm no Trump lover. However, I do think DEI was the wrong approach.
Many here work in tech. I'm sure some or many of us here have silently experienced unfair DEI hiring and promotion practices at least once. I've seen some truly incompetent people get hired and promoted purely to meet a certain DEI goal. It reminds me of Affirmative Action but for the work place.
This is coming from someone who absolutely hates the tech bro culture and hates that there aren't enough women in tech. No male tech worker likes environments where there are 10 guys to 1 girl and the insane gender imbalance in tech heavy cities that make dating impossible for a large portion of the population. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and turn the tech industry into 10 women for every 1 man. Believe me.
Damore’s letter was extremely balanced and had all the appropriate caveats about being applied to individuals. But what we’re seeing as the countervailing force to “woke” and “DEI” is unfortunately not like this. It’s as reactionary as the most egregious DEI programs.
If you zoom out far enough, all these companies are making business decisions - not emotional ones. They have to kiss Trump's ring and bend the knee for Elon in order to not get destroyed. When they had DEI, it was created for business reason too - to be seen as socially just so you should buy their products. Now Google thinks it's better for business if they fall in line with what Trump wants.
> When they had DEI, it was created for business reason too - to be seen as socially just so you should buy their products.
You don't think that was "to not get destroyed" too? Such as when New York city was sued (and lost, having to pay out $1.8 billion) because too many minorities failed its test for teachers:
There's a big difference between obeying laws (which all companies pretty much have to do if they want to stay in business) and voluntarilly aligning with what they think a new president wants without there being any specific law forcing them to do that.
I actually think the business reason FOR the DEI stuff (to appeal to customers by coming accross as fair and progressive) made more sense. Have the customers really changed their minds just because someone else is in the Whitehouse?
Appealing to customers by coming across as fair and progressive is great. But Google has a huge anti-trust lawsuit that can wreck them. Trump can probably make that go away.
If they stay more "woke", Trump is guaranteed to try to destroy Google.
Google has done the calculus and likely concluded that kissing Trump's ass is better for their shareholders than continuing to align more left.
I think this is a business decision, as it was for Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Blame US citizens for giving so much power to Trump.
I think it is more than just Trump. We do have to remember that some companies are currently being sued by shareholders for attempting to keep DEI around. Or at least was threatened to be.
I don’t know if these lawsuits would win or not but given the current political climate I sure wouldn’t bet against it. From a purely business prospective on that alone, I can see why they would do it. And do it so quickly.
This is the latest symptom of a very powerful opposition that just gained almost unlimited power. Or at least unchecked power. To be clear here Trump is also a symptom, this didn’t come out of nowhere with him.
Be mad and hold these companies accountable but we also can’t afford to be distracted by the symptoms when those in power are going to make it so much worse.
Unironically, the comments such as yours are downvoted. I had an idealised view about our industry, but it has now shattered during the course of the last year.
College grads have an idealized view of tech industry. But it's all about money at the end of the day and tech is turning into something similar to other industries like oil or pharma.
The complete rollover on this is kind of disheartening.
Were a lot of these programs a performative kabuki theatre that wasted time and money? Yes. Were companies ever going to fill their ranks with black, lesbian programmers? No.
On the other hand, now having worked my way up in the tech world, the idea that the C-suite decision makers are there through some sort of meritocracy is also equally laughable. These are exclusive circles, and your breeding (family, school, frat) already determines your access more than success ever will.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the ideal of giving more types of people a chance. But it was an issue of execution, not intent.
Read Judge Amit Mehta's ruling on their behavior gaming ad auctions to hit Revenue targets. Then think about non reaction of the Advertising Industry.
Achieving Monopoly and Domination requires kabuki performances.
There is no other route. These are mentally bankrupt one dimensional people. Other than survival and accumulation of status and wealth there is nothing much going on in their head.
Never listen to their words, only pay attention to their actions.
You hit it dead-on that a lot of these DEI initiatives were performance theater to appease some external force (as is most of business, when you really think about it). The existing leadership had zero intent to actually allow under-represented minorities into their ranks other than as a token or trophy figure who would kiss the ring and not rock the boat.
The real success (or failure) of DEI will be the next crop of leaders, not the current ones. The managers and leaders of tomorrow (who are the ICs and team leads of today) are acutely aware of how much of a Straight White Boy’s Club these leadership ranks are, and the vibe I get is increasing disgust at the proclamation of “merit” as justification for their tenure while (often minority) high performers are routinely exited out in favor of yet another H1B overseas.
I’m hoping this is just the last gasps of relevance from the status quo in the face of generational upheaval. Guess we’ll all find out together.
Take a breath and take this from first principles...
People tend to be tribal. People, when interviewing and select, will tend to hire people that look like them. A white guy from a white school from a white neighbourhood is far more likely to hire another white guy because that's what the've spent their whole lives surrounded by. This is justified a million ways, but what it boils down to is favouring someone who is a certain race.
And when tech is already full of white guys, it just means more white guys will be hired in tech... Cause maths.
All DEI was doing in the tech world was saying, "try interview at least one woman/ black person etc". Also maybe some training on how to avoid the pitfall in an interview of just hiring someone the same as you.
But look around you in the office. How many women are there? How many black people? How many... Black women?!?! Yea, I thought so.
If you are talking about "merit based" then that is "DEI". If you are talking about "people who look and act like me", then you are racist.
Anyway, excluding people leads to worse outcomes. Unfortunately, it makes life harder for people on the way.
> All DEI was doing in the tech world was saying, "try interview at least one woman/ black person etc". Also maybe some training on how to avoid the pitfall in an interview of just hiring someone the same as you.
A lot of people are strongly in favour of this, of course, including me. But are you sure that's all that it was doing?
Kind of yes. This was what it was attempting to do.
Now I must say, in practice. In over 12 years of working in two large multinationals as a "tech interviewer" (That is, once someone went through the management interview and HR interview), I never interviewed a black person or a woman. Anicdotal? Yes. But 12 years is a loooooong time.
Anyway, just literally look around an office, or look at a leadership tree, and you can see for yourself. This isn't hard to demonstrate.
What makes you believe that just because there is X percent of category 1 in set A it is "unjust" if there is not X percent of category 1 in an unrelated set B?
Also why do you think this principle applies to the categories Women and Blacks, and not for instance people with diabetes, psychopaths and people who like Taylor swift?
The idea that there’s one specific axis on which to judge job candidates that’s 100% objective is a fantasy. Leetcode certainly doesn’t predict how well someone will do at Google, or what they can contribute to a team. If anyone actually believed that they wouldn’t even do interviews.
Where have DEI initiatives lowered standards of hiring at Google?
I think you’re making that up! Be specific, don't deflect and shift into general discourse topics. I am not talking about distractions at work, I'm asking about your specific claim that hiring standards were lowered.
> Where have DEI initiatives lowered standards of hiring at Google?
Other than DeepMind, almost everywhere at Google. For Google to be wasting time on useless initiatives instead of remaining competitive against other companies would have made the difference between survival in this AI race ever since their CEO (Sundar) panicked.
It is no wonder many ex-Googlers have lost confidence and left for their competitors who are solely focused on destroying Google after they lost the lead and created an opening.
> I think you’re making that up!
Really.
How exactly is DEI going to save Google in the very deep trouble that they are already in? Losing lots of *key* talent, potential anti-trust breakup, frontier AI companies like OpenAI going after them.
I don't think you are paying close attention. Will more DEI initiatives and hires save Google and stop their own CEO from panicking?
> Be specific, don't deflect and shift into general discourse topics. I am not talking about distractions at work, I'm asking about your specific claim that hiring standards were lowered.
You deflected and did not pay attention. My reply was very specific even after answering your strawman question. My question is very simple:
How is DEI hiring going to save Google right now given all the trouble that they are in?
The loss of dei programs is bad but isn't the big bad. The big bad comes when businesses start being forced to prove that they arent doing dei. Every hire may soon have to be examined under inverse lenses: to prove that they are not dei. Real evils will then creep back into business culture. Be under no illusions. Those evils still lurk in every back office.
This is a fantastical speculation based on no evidence other than political bias. We do have evidence, though, that candidates had to go through performative hiring practices to prove that they support "diversity".
At Google? Where’s the evidence? Most DEI efforts come down to making sure you give a diverse candidate pool a chance to prove themselves instead of just hiring buddies that look and think and act exactly the same. That’s hardly “performative”.
A friend once said to me "that road doesnt need a speed limit anymore. It hasnt had a fatal accident for many years. And cars are safer now. Dont burden people with stupid restrictions." Evil is patient.
Agree. As a parent to an Asian boy, I’m thankful that steps are being taken to ensure he isn’t discriminated against for school admissions and job applications.
That’s not how DEI programs operated at places I’ve worked. They were more about expanding candidate searches to look for high quality people at other places than we’d been looking, reducing alcohol at company events etc
This is a minor detail but reducing or removing alcohol all together (my company) from social events for inclusion reasons is excluding people who like consuming alcohol at social events. We somehow pivoted to embracing restrictions in order to accommodate small groups of people, instead of offering alternatives (e.g. vegan options). This will always irritate other groups of people and is not a sustainable way to improve inclusion.
> reducing or removing alcohol all together (my company) from social events for inclusion reasons is excluding people who like consuming alcohol at social events
Reducing or removing alcohol at social events is not done for "inclusion reasons" but for straightforward legal liability reasons: a drunk employee often has poor impulse control and may do or say shitty things that they wouldn't if they were sober, and with some probability this results in lawsuits against the company. No drunk people at social events -> fewer lawsuits.
Sure and one answer to that was simply to ensure soft beverage availability in addition to alcohol. Which was an initiative borne from a DEI program. We’re debating specifics of DEI-relevant initiatives. What I’m saying is these discussions only happen when there is space for DEI consideration
I am not nitpicking and in general am in support of offering more diverse options. However, in my experience I can't remember a single event where soft drinks where not offered in additional to alcohol: pre DEI or during the DEI era.
As a vegetarian, I really struggled finding good non-meat options though.
Well, if businesses had to prove that each hire is related to dei, which was the previous state of affairs, many would argue that is when evil creeps into business culture.
“The survey highlights two interesting facts: 46% of tech employees have noticed an increase in DEI investments in 2020, and 51% companies now report on DEI metrics. However, the report also highlights the need for continued action. 14% of technology companies today do not invest in DEI programs and initiatives.”
I’ve found 5-10 more similar sources via a quick google search.
While the law did not compel a business to report dei metrics to my knowledge (besides boards of public companies via the SEC), the impact of mass virtual signaling had the practical effect of compelling businesses of embracing dei or face being labeled as racists or immoral, which is a form of coercion by itself. I’d argue it would have been be better if such actions were simply deemed as illegal rather than racists or immoral. So with that said, I would argue the previous state of affairs was significantly worse with dei measures in place.
Putting the power back to the law rather than to a group of loosely collected virtual signalers is a better world imo.
